Life goes on, but it does not feel good

By Adam Nicolson

12:01AM GMT 18 Mar 2003

"The Home Front", as a phrase and an idea, has completely evaporated. The thing it describes no longer exists. Modern, post-Cold War wars do not exert the grip or the discipline on us that "Home Front" implies.

We live as if the war isn't happening, continuing as though the electricians are at work in another room, sorting out an irritating problem with the systems by which our world operates, our paid agents whose tinkering might cause us a little annoyance, a trip switch flipped perhaps, two minutes' worth of computer work lost, but essentially non-disruptive.

We are not part of any war. Walls no longer have ears. We wouldn't dream of digging for victory. We might consider investing in government bonds, not because we are thinking of doing our part, but simply because the equity markets continue to look so dire.

In one deeply disturbing sense, we - that is, your average, scarcely politicised person - are not going to war. It is an event that is rich with fascinating moral conundrums, but it has no cost for us, beyond the low-level threat of a domestic terrorist attack. As far as we are concerned, modern war doesn't hurt, unless, of course, you have family or friends involved in potential military action.

I am writing this on the south coast of Cornwall, in a boatyard at Tregatreath on Mylor Creek, one of the arms of the sea that reach inland from the great natural harbour of Carrick Roads, the most beautiful stretch of water in England.

A friend and I are preparing a boat for a long cruise this year up the west coast of Ireland and on to the Hebrides. We spend our days in filthy, stinking bilges or fixing the winches or struggling to stow away the million and one odds and ends that seem necessary for a life at sea.

All around us others are doing the same. Nowhere in Mylor, or in Falmouth down the road, is there any sign that all is not right with the world. In the sailmakers' loft, where our new mainsail and yankee have just been sewn and bagged up, boat owners are queueing for new sets of sails. In the outboard shop down the road, it's the same story. Yamahas and Evinrudes are walking out.

Self-tailing Harken winches at £800 a time are ranged up, shelf on shelf, in the chandlery at Mylor. In the cold sunshine at the weekend, one middle-aged man after another could be seen showing off the new boat he had acquired for the new season, all shop perfect, no varnish chipped, clean toys for the happy life. Step aboard. Look at this.

Look at me. Isn't life marvellous? In the boat next to ours this morning, to rollicking, delightful laughter, champagne was being cracked open. Build-up to war? Not here.

What to make of this strange disjunction? The political classes are being stretched beyond all experience by the dilemmas posed by the Iraq crisis. Tony Blair, the most buoyant and resilient politician of his generation, has stiffened and tightened into a different figure altogether, rigidified by the demands of being out of step with most of the country and almost all of the Continent.

He has become a figure who knows and tells rather than asks and suggests. We are witnessing the transition of a once-instinctively populist politician into an increasingly isolated and inelastic figure. It may well be the final Thatcherisation of Mr Blair. Certainly, in the wake of that, the entire nature of this Government has been thrown into flux.

The founding political and military structures of the post-war world - Nato, the UN, the EC - have been fatally damaged by what has happened already. There is at least the possibility of a horrifying siege of Baghdad. And on we go with our tinkering, our cleaning of the bilges, as though this Götterdämmerung simply wasn't happening.

In part, it is simply a return to a previous way of war. Until the 20th century, this was how it was. Most of us sat at home while a few professionals went and did our killing for us. Soldiers in Jane Austen's novels, for example, might hold some allure for teenage girls, but are essentially distant figures, who do something far away of which we know nothing and then return to the real world of drawing rooms, picnics and expeditions to the seaside, full of bombast, vainglory and irrelevance.

The big shift came in the aftermath of the First World War. The most chilling thing ever written about the chasm between soldier and civilian, and the loathing of one for the other, is Siegfried Sassoon's poem Blighters, first published to horrified, opinion-changing acclaim in 1918. It is something to read this week. He imagines an evening in the West End towards the end of the war:

The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din; "We're sure the Kaiser loves our dear old Tanks!" I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls, Lurching to rag-time tunes, or "Home, sweet Home", And there'd be no more jokes in Music-halls To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.

In the Second World War, as a reality, and in the Cold War, as a threat, that gap between Home Front and frontline shrank to zero. Everyone was in the same dangerous boat. But it has now opened up again.

At the weekend the newspapers were full of tips on how to ensure your holiday was not disrupted by any unattractive goings-on in the Middle East. The finance sections were advising us all on how to catch the bounce in the market when the war is over. The soldier is no longer one of us. We attend to our teak coamings and our sails.

He goes off to kill or be killed in some desert. It does not feel good. It is as if the war is part of the unseen service sector, like the cleaners who come in at night, hoovering up the mess so that we can arrive in the morning and somehow imagine that mess disappears of its own accord.